Today, mobile phones are used for various other activities in addition to voice communication. Examples of such activities include, but are not limited to video communication, accessing electronic mails, messaging services, internet surfing, navigation purposes, location based services, using messenger applications, broadcast services and playing offline or online games. The usage of mobile phones, due to the said activities, has increased to a level that users are often reachable throughout the day over their mobile phones. Thus, mobile telephony has become a primary mode of communication and is often kept on highest priority for reaching out to the users during any emergency situations. The users of the mobile phones may be intimated about the emergency situation using voice based services, text based services and/or multimedia based services.
For example, in case of any emergency in an alert area, an alert message is broadcasted to users over their mobile phones in the alert area. In the mobile telephony, for example the Global Systems for Mobile communication (GSM), the users may be warned about the emergency situation using a Cell Broadcasting (CB) with Short Message Service (SMS) which allows a network operator to broadcast a CB alert message to users within a certain cell or group of cells. An area of each cell may range from a few yards to several miles depending upon the number of subscribers and need.
Once the alert area is defined for sending CB alert messages, cells corresponding to the alert area are identified and the alert message is sent to all the users under the identified cells. However, there may be a scenario, where the alert area may be a smaller area than the area covered by the identified cells due to the range defined for each cell. As a result, the alert message will also be received by users who are outside the alert area but are within the range of the identified cells. In a situation, where the alert message is a business related message or any promotional message, it may be acceptable to send such messages to all the users in the identified cells. However, in some scenarios it is important to have high accuracy alerting, so that alert messages are sent only to those users who are within a specific alert area (geographical area) rather than alerting all users under the identified cells. Therefore, knowledge of each user's current location in the identified cells is important prior to sending the alert messages.